Founding Design Engineer

This Role

You will own Uplift AI’s entire brand identity and the most challenging interface design projects. Like helping people annotate audio 10× faster without getting tired or distracted. Or making it easy for busy small-business owners to provide feedback that helps their voice AI agents improve themselves.

What we do

We build voice models and voice applications for regional languages — Urdu, Bengali, Pashto, Greek, and more — so people around the world can use technology by simply speaking.

We gather our own data, build our own labeling tools, train our own models, and design our own voice infrastructure. This fully integrated approach is what lets us deliver the highest-quality models, and the best developer experience, for regional languages.

Why our work matters

Over 60% of the world's population only speaks a regional language. Today voice models aren’t good enough in their languages.
Large tech companies are unable to give this work tier1 priority because they are busy defending their primary business. In fact, in all big labs regional languages are funded by Marketing/PR budgets.
If UpliftAI doesn’t do its work, a large part of the world may continue to experience significant AI technical lag — further worsening the income divide between countries.

But also, it’s very cool making machine speak soooo well (check out our homepage).

The story of how we started

Hammad left Apple and took a year off to figure out what to do in the next phase of his career. During this time, he started a side project gathering data for Pakistani languages so people could talk to ChatGPT by speaking (this was before they supported voice mode).

To gather this data, he traveled to factories and rural areas in Pakistan. While speaking with business owners there, he learned that many businesses are not using digital tools (like HR software or inventory management) simply because their workforce cannot read or write. (Btw, Pakistan is the 5th most populous country in the world, but 42% of all adults there cannot read).

That is when the idea first emerged: what if everyone could use technology by speaking? Voice interfaces can finally digitizing businesses that currently cannot. This would increase worker productivity — which at scale lifts the entire GDP of developing countries. Globally, 1 billion people cannot read, and voice interfaces will finally give them access to digital services… often for the first time.

What we offer you

• A mission worthy of being your life’s work.
• True ownership of work.
• Top-tier teammates that are ambitious, smart and fun.
• Top percentile equity and pay that truly value your talent and opportunity cost.

What we expect from you

• Proof of exceptional talent — demonstrated via past accomplishments. A good way to answer this is to think about: “What have you done that none of your peers did?“
• Ability to get work done 3x faster than peers, through creative problem solving.
• Ability to design and ship production interfaces in React and TypeScript—not just create mockups.

Who are we

Hammad - CEO: ex Apple, ex Amazon, Cornell alumnus. Previously developed voice technology at Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa for about 9 years.
I created my first website at age 13 to sell wallpapers & software. This was year 2003 before even wordpress existed. It was hosted over dialup from home.
Zaid - CTO: Zaid previously designed and launched an entire AWS service: Bedrock Guardrails. Before that, at Amazon, Zaid wrote a paper on how to optimally plan and pack products in containers to minimize transportation and destination distribution cost in Amazon’s global import supply chain. This work led to $100m/year saving.

Your first 90 days

Below is one 90 day plan… but we are happy to change it based on your feedback.

• First 30 days: Work directly with customers and audio labelers, understand their most painful workflows, and ship your first meaningful improvement.
• First 60 days: Redesign and build our audio annotation and evaluation tools, with the goal of helping people work 10× faster without becoming tired or distracted.
• First 90 days: Ship a new way for small-business owners to create and improve voice agents without needing to understand prompt engineering or machine learning.
• First year: Create a coherent design system across Uplift’s brand, products, and internal tools.